The One And Only Pickering

April 27, 1997|By GARRET CONDON

The Blue Caterpillar and Other Essays

By Sam Pickering, University Press of Florida, $24.95, 237 pp.

This is Sam Pickering's eighth book of familiar essays, by my count. Eight books approaches literary critical mass. All these years and countless hikes behind the University of Connecticut horse barns later, the least we can do is to describe his kind of essay as a genre apart. And we should probably name it for him. It would be the ``Pickering,'' as in: ``I used to write standard essays, but I now work entirely in `Pickerings.' ''

Not that there are a lot of others out there currently using this form. But it could happen. DNA is peculiar stuff. You might get a young writer given to: taking taxonomic inventory of every weed along his driveway; strolling the woods near UConn in a blizzard; writing silly, cranky letters to the people who make Mott's applesauce; bringing home bull scrotums as souvenirs from a cattle ranch; attending a literary conference and recording the dialogue of an Armenian poet obsessed with the f-word; and putting it all down in amusingly meandering prose that's as likely to shoot off into the bush during a son's soccer game as to compute the exact percentage edited from a manuscript -- 13.54 percent.

Come to think of it, the ``Pickering'' would be rather hard for others to pick up. I forgot about stopping in the midst of a Mansfield marsh or East Hartford car dealership and taking the reader into a parallel universe of small-town Tennessee humor. And then there is the touch of wistfulness that will be hard to imitate -- career paths not taken; children outgrowing the family Christmas rituals; losing oneself in the family keepsakes that a demented uncle no longer recognizes.

And who could match the author's taste for Connecticut's wildlife? This taste is not only a predilection. He has been known to dine on native fruits and roots. (Nutmeggers who believe ``Connecticut wildlife'' to be an oxymoron would do well to investigate the Pickering form.) And the would-be Pickering-slinger must have a clear eye and good pair of walking shoes. ``When I am out of sorts, I walk,'' writes Pickering. And when he walks, he see such sights: ``Carillons of white blossoms swayed on silverbells, their waxy orange stamens clappers ringing not to the ear, but to the eye.''

But I guess this is hopeless. Pickering's genre is unique, but I'm not sure anyone else can write this stuff. I can live with that, as long as Pickering himself continues to wend through the forests, classrooms, airports, billiards championships, hometown parades and his inner world of Tennessee gags and characters.

Maybe it's not so important to pass on the man's literary form as to revel as a reader in the sweet surprises of ``The Blue Caterpillar'' and take a page from Pickering's joy in small things and the quality of awareness that brings those things to life in these essays. As the father of the ``Pickering'' himself writes: ``The more observant a person is, the odder life appears.''